My next browser?
Posting from Phoenix 0.1, a re-casting of Mozilla as a browser rather than a bloated suite. No mail client. No IM client. No Composer. No spreadsheet. A browser. It’s already pretty quick, and they’ve just started throwing away the cruft that has built up in Mozilla. Another milestone or two, a few prefs added back in, and I could use this.
(Potential dealbreaker: I’m sitting here watching the caret (that is what the blinking vertical bar in a text input is called, isn’t it?) blink away on top of the right edge of the final letter, rather than off to the right of it. It seems like it’s always the textarea problems that drive me away from Mozilla.)
i’ve been using phoenix off and on for a few days now. it’s really not too bad for a .1 release. otherwise, except for sites that require IE, mozilla 1.1 (now 1.2) is my browser of choice. this from a guy who couldn’t say ’netscape’ without spitting on the ground. mozilla is blowing me away. IE6 feels fat and sluggish after this.
It’s possible to install a browser-only Mozilla. I’ve done it. Much slimmer menus. :)
Does it have tabbed browsing?
It’s usually called a cursor. This is a caret: ^ ;)
Well, yeah, it’s usually called a cursor, but that’s by people aren’t thinking about the fact that they moved the ”mouse pointer” out of the way after they clicked in the textarea, and that the arrow sitting off on the right side of the screen is actually the cursor. Once they think about that, then they’ll call the vertical bar the ”insertion point”, but it seems to me that somewhere (possibly in one of the long rambling BugZilla entries on textarea problems) I saw a technical explanation of all the various items and their correct formal names, and the vertical bar was a caret (from the fact that the symbol over the 6 is the proofreaders mark saying ”insert here”).
Tabbed browsing? Oh yeah. You betcha. Loving that (as long as I remember not to hit the big red X to close a tab – ouch).
The browser-only Mozilla install, Jonathon? Yes, it does have tabbed browsing.
Tabbed browsing is great in Mozilla–especially if you adjust the preferences so a middle-mouse button click on a link opens a new tab. The tabs can also be set to load in the background which is great when you want to read a bunch of comment pages or a number of articles off the front page–just middle-click a link, and keep reading the front page without interruption while the other pages load.
Phoenix is not bad at all for a 0.1 release but since I have Mozilla set to stay loaded in memory (stays in the system tray), there is virtually no loading time–so I just stick with Mozilla 1.2a for now. ;-)
Using a Phoenix nightly at the minute (on a different computer, so had to download a Mozilla build of some kind). Not bad, if you’re only looking for a standalone browser.
I’d probably use it all the time if they could dramatically cut down the size.
Phoenix Is Preparing for Takeoff
I love Web standards and especially open-source software that conforms to standards, but since Mozilla arrived, I’ve been disappointed with
The possibilities of (Firefox) search
To become aware of the possiblity of the search is to be onto something. (Walker Percy) I first heard about Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox from a September 2002 Phil Ringalda a post titled My Next Browser?: Posting from Phoenix 0.1, a re-casting of …